Brilliant LTE display at Busan Fireworks festival in Korea

Ask any operator’s Chief Marketing Officer where and when network performance matters most, and you will get a straight answer pointing to the next mega event. Ask a network optimization expert and you’ll get the same answer, backed up with facts regarding expected user density and mobile broadband traffic estimates far beyond the normal average. And thanks to social media, photos and videos from the event as well as potential discontent about network performance are shared faster and more widely than ever before.

LTE user density is driven by LTE adoption in the country of the event and the geographical density of people gathering at the event. Now imagine a stretch of beach roughly 1 km in length, with about 1.5 million people side-by-side watching a much-loved and anticipated annual fireworks festival. Now think about the LTE adoption in Korea, where 70% of the population are currently LTE subscribers. And now you can appreciate what the famous annual Busan Fireworks festival means from an LTE network perspective.

This is also why Nokia considers the Busan Fireworks festival as THE mega event benchmark for LTE networks. We are proud to report, for the third year in a row, that we helped our customer ensure that its subscribers were delighted by the outstanding LTE network performance provided throughout the event. Beyond ensuring 100% LTE network availability successfully, Nokia also made sure that 99.4% of VoLTE calls were successful, even during the traffic peak hour of the event.

So what do you need to deliver superior LTE performance in circumstances like this and score these kinds of numbers?

Firstly you need a reliable network, which builds on the Nokia Flexi Multiradio 10 Base Station as well as Nokia’s latest LTE software, which for example ensured that the mobile traffic was balanced in real time across the multiple LTE frequency bands in use. Also, real-time monitoring is needed and Nokia Traffica has once again shown why it’s such a powerful tool for driving network optimization measures.

Secondly, you need network optimization experts to forecast what will happen during the event, and who have prepared and optimized the network in advance.

About the author

Steve Park

Jung-Hoon (Steve) Park is responsible for Korea Customer Marketing at Nokia Networks. Since Korea has the world’s highest internet and smartphone penetration as well as the fastest LTE deployment, Steve is focused on new Nokia branding and marketing activities for the most advanced high-tech customers in the world. Steve has a colorful industry background having worked with Apple Korea, responsible for overall product marketing and communications, and Sony Korea in sales and marketing of broadcasting equipment to Korean TV stations.